Monday, June 13, 2016

I have been reading the stories in the Summer Fiction Issue of The New Yorker—June 6 & 13, 2016.

I liked the Zadie Smith story "Two Men Arrive in a Village"
and, with some reservations, the Ben Lerner story "The Polish Rider." In this post, I will talk a bit about the Zadie Smith story. Next week, I will talk about Ben Lerner's story.

However, I am not going to talk
about the Langston Hughes story "Seven People Dancing," which I found
was only historically interesting as the recovery of a mss about a dated
cultural system. Nor will I talk about the
Jonathan Safran Foer piece, for drawn from his new novel Here I Am, which will be out in September, it is not a story—just a
lot of loose writing. I thought about commenting on the difference between
chapters in novels and short stories, but according to Foer, this is not a
chapter, but a composite piece from several hundred pages in his upcoming
novel. Not really interesting to me.

Zadie Smith, "Two Men
Arrive in a Village"

In the "This Week in Fiction" on-line New Yorker feature, Zadie
Smith is asked, as most authors are, about
the "source" of her story. Smith said the story had two
sources: the Romanian movie "Aferim," which had an archetypal setup
of two men going around a country terrorizing people. The other source, she
says, was a conversation she had with an old school friend of hers, who had
given her a Hungarian fabulist novel to read that he liked—a sort of allegory
with characters called "The Grandmother," "The Soldier,"
etc. She says although she wanted to like it because her friend did, she had
trouble getting over the idea of "mythic archetypes."

When she expressed this reservation to her friend, he replied,
"Well, your fiction is so obsessively local, but there's another, more
universal way of writing that has a different kind of power." Then, Smith says she was annoyed, as most
postcolonial writers and critics often are, with the word
"universal," perhaps suspecting that it marginalizes third-word
countries and privileges Western European thought and values.

However, Smith says her friend's comments got her to thinking how the
local and the specific perhaps enable one kind of "engagement" while
blocking another, particularly when you are talking about violence, for
example, "Oh, that's just what happens in Africa." She began to think
that perhaps specific details in fiction allow the reader to hold certain situations
at a distance. She wondered: "Is it possible to write a story that happens
in many places at many times simultaneously? That implicates
everybody." Smith mentions this
notion also at a reading of "Two Men Arrive at a Village" she gave
March 1, 2016 at Newcomb College, Tulane University," asking, "Is
there a way to write a story not just about one person's pain in one particular
place, but about pain in general, in all places, at all times, amongst all
people?"

The story is quite short—a little over five New Yorker columns, or about 2,000 words. Smith's reading of it,
which you can listen to on New Yorker's
podcast "The Author's Voice," takes less than 15 minutes. Smith says
the story, including the title, all came together at once when she was sitting
in a cafe in Calgary, and she wrote it in
a few hours—the first time such a thing had ever happened to her.

"Two Men Arrive at a Village" is a fairly straightforward
narrative of two men coming to what seems to be an African village, robbing the
people, killing a boy, and raping young girls. The narrator identifies herself
as one of the villagers in this early sentence in the story: "What we can
say with surety is that when these two men arrived in the village we spotted
them at once, at the horizon point where the long road that leads to the next
village meets the setting sun. And we understood what they meant by coming at
this time."

However, since the story is told or written at some point in time after
the event occurred, as most stories necessarily are, the narrator, whoever she
is, reflects and comments on the significance of the arrival of the two men,
seeing it, although a specific event, as indeed, typical or archetypal. In the opening paragraphs she says that the
men come sometimes on horseback, sometimes by foot or in a car. "But if we look at the largest possible
picture, the longest view, we must admit that it is by foot that they have
mostly come, and so in this sense, at least, our example is
representative. In fact, it has the perfection
of parable."

And with this self-conscious, self-reflexive comment, the piece is
established not as a description of a particular time when two men arrive at a
village, although indeed it does focus on a specific time that the narrator has
made a story about, but rather a time, like many other such times and thus
typical or representative, i.e. a parable that universalizes such a visit.

Given the parable nature of the story, the two men are presented as
two-dimensional stereotypes. The
narrator says: "It goes without saying that one of the men is tall, rather
handsome—in a vulgar way—a little dim and vicious, while the other man is
shorter, weasel-faced, and sly." There is no essential reason that the two
men are physically as described, except for the narrator's need to create stereotypes—stereotypes
the narrator or reader might be more apt to know from movies than from reality.

The narrator continues to universalize or stereotype the two men,
making assumptions about their typicality as srepresentative of human nature in
general: "The two men like to arrive in this manner, with a more or less
friendly greeting, and this might remind us of the fact that all humans, no
matter what they do, like very much to be liked, even if it's only for an hour
or so before they are feared or hated."

The story is marked, of course, by the tension felt by the villagers
and, of course, the reader, as they and we expect something horrible to happen. And when it does happen--the vicious machete
slaying of a fourteen-year-old boy who stands up to the men—" a kind of wildness
descends, a bloody chaos, into which all the formal gestures of welcome and
food and threat seem instantly to dissolve."

Since the visit takes place at a time when only old men, women, and children
are in the village, it is the women who band together against the two men,
standing in a linked circle around the young girls. But the narrator sees this
as "pointless courage," for one of the men kicks a woman in the
groin, breaking up the protective circle, and the narrator, who now experiences
the horrible "afterwards" in which to generalize, says, "bloody
chaos found no more obstruction to its usual plans."

The next day the chief's wife, who, the narrator says, is more of a
chief to the villagers than the chief has ever been, returns to the village.
The narrator describes her as a "sly and courageous" woman who
believes that such men who have visited the village are like the wind that
blows there, anonymous, inhuman forces, who "lose themselves, their names
and faces, and can no longer claim merely to bring the whirlwind, they are that
wind. This is of course a metaphor. But
she lives by it." It is a metaphor that prepares for the story's
conclusion.

The chief's wife goes to the girls who have been attacked and finds one
who has the courage to tell her story in full, the end of which, the narrator
says, is "the most strange." For the short, sly man has told the girl
he was an orphan who has suffered as all men do and has seen horror and now
wants only to have babies with this girl and live far away from villages and
towns. The girl, stunned by the idea,
says the young man wanted her to know his name. "He had no shame,"
she tells the chief's wife. He said he
did not want to think that he had passed through my village, through my body,
without anybody caring what he was called. It is probably not his real name but
he said his name was—"

And at this point, Zadie Smith makes this account a unified short story
with this abrupt ending of the chief's wife refusing to hear the man's name.

"But the chief's wife stood up suddenly, left the room, and walked
out into the yard."

I have only been able to find a couple of people on line who have said
they have read the story, both on the reddit
website. One says, "I didn't get
the ending. Why did the chief leave" Another says, "I wonder the
same. Also what was the connection
between the political situation in their country and the arrival of the two
men?"

It seems to me that these two questions are typical of readers who try
to read this piece as if it were a portion of a novel rather than as the unified
short story parable it is. In my opinion,
as a reader of short stories, there are two reasons the chief's wife leaves
before the young girl can tell her the name of the man who raped her:

In terms of the details of the
story, the chief's wife does not want the rape to be personalized, wants the
villain to remain that faceless, anonymous horror that he is, wants no possible
justification or explanation for the horror of the acts.

And in terms of the nature of the story, Smith wants, to the very end,
to have written a story in which horror is universalized, not particularized—a
parable of a universal horror, not a realistic story of a particular event.

The reddit reader who asks
about the connection between the relationship between the political situation
of the country and the two men, just wants the kind of social context that a
novel might try to provide—not the bleak universal horror of two faceless men who,
one horrible day, like all such horrible days, arrive in a village. It does not need a social or political context, any more than it needs the name of the young man.

1 comment:

Thanks for posting this; you offer one of the only satisfying and sensitive discussions of this wonderful story that I've yet to find online. I agree with your interpretation of the ending. I'm about to teach this story alongside "The Embassy of Cambodia" as representative of two different ethical functions for literature: the highly localized (which encourages identification with something that would otherwise seem foreign) and the highly generalized (which reinforces the tragic frequency with which violence strikes, and allows readers to map the story onto their own experiences). Thanks!

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About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."